Memory isn't perfect...

"Although PTSD is triggered by trauma, it is really a disease of memory. The problem isn't the trauma; it's that... the emotional charge of the memories remain hair-trigger and consequently intrude into numerous activities of daily living."

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Individuals can experience gaps or amnesia of important parts of a distressing event. This disrupted memory fragment may be caused by the amygdala's overactivation during the event which inhibits effective signaling to the thalamus and hypocampus. When the hypocampus doesn't activate properly the memory encoding of a time stamp is disrupted . The hypocampus is additionally responsible for storing the imprint of memories. When there is an extreme amygdala activation the effect can be memories (pictures) stored without their associated felt-sense (body) experience that occurred at the time of the event.  Often the narrative langguage connection to the event was not created either because the time of the event was a pre-verbal stage of survivor or the flood of amygdala impulse signaling cut off the neuronal wring to the part of the brain responsible for language and cohesive story.

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"A key assumption in the study of stress-induced cognitive and neurobiological modifications is that alterations in hippocampal functioning after stress are due to an excessive activity exerted by the amygdala on the hippocampus. In fact, under normal conditions emotionally charged events are better remembered compared with neutral ones. Results indicate that under these conditions there is an increase in activity within the amygdala that may lead to memory of a different quality."

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